Texas and Mississippi Fully Reopen Now!

By Neenah Payne

We were asked last March to self-quarantine for 15 days to “flatten the curve”. As that has stretched into a year-long devastating lockdown, there have been repeated attempts to re-open America.

Trump tried. Trump unveils ‘Opening Up America’ plan, aims for May 1 said “President Trump on Thursday announced new guidelines for reopening states as soon as May 1 now that the coronavirus appears to be peaking in the US, but he left the decision up to each state’s governor while recommending criteria that would have to be met for each to gradually reopen…“Based on the latest data, our team of experts agree we can start the next front in our war, which we are calling Opening Up America Again”.”

The Great Reopening on January 30! shows that even New York’s Governor Cuomo said it’s time to re-open. Meanwhile, people are not waiting for governments to end the lockdowns: ‘NO-MASK’ RESTAURANT REBELS AGAINST NEWSOM and Carlsbad, CA Says No More to Lockdowns. May It Be a National Model!

BOLD — Call For Businesses To Re-Open March 1! shows that Alfie Oakes, Founder & CEO of Oakes Farms in Florida, is leading the BOLD initiative that called on all businesses to re-open on March 1. Oakes explains that almost 3,000 businesses signed up and lawyers in various states are offering to do pro bono work. Oakes says this is the first step.

Oakes’ Seed To Table store is having a Freedom Rally on March 6 and a lot of people are coming, including some big names. His store has become a place for patriots. Oakes says, “We can make this happen. We can change the course of history!”

16 States Have Had Enough of COVID Restrictions!

The governors of Texas and Mississippi just declared their states will fully reopen – no masks mandates and no restrictions on businesses!

16 States Are Now Following The Science shows that Texas and Mississippi are not alone. It points out:

“It took an entire year, but lockdowns and mask mandates are officially incredibly unpopular with half of the country, to the point that governors are rapidly making sweeping changes to their year-long COVID-19 policies.

Jumping onto the coattails of pro-individual freedom leaders like governors Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) and Kristi Noem (R-SD), the governors of Mississippi and Texas decided Tuesday to announce an end to business restrictions and statewide mask mandates. Both Tate Reeves (R-MS) and Greg Abbott (R-TX), who had long taken a nanny state approach to the COVID-19 crisis, acted almost simultaneously to announce the end of statewide restrictions.”

It adds:

“The centrally planned solutions to COVID-19 have failed spectacularly, and the American people have taken notice of this reality. Hundreds of millions have now been through a full year of government-imposed tyranny on both a federal and state level. Whether it was a travel ban, an endless series of lockdowns, mask mandates, countless emergency orders, business closures, and the like, not a single top-down order from the federal or state level did anything productive for the wellbeing of Americans.

None of it worked. All of it served as a net negative. The people have noticed. Now that their constituents have had enough, politicians on the Right are fast departing from the COVID tyranny, and attempting to secure what is left of their political aspirations. Abbott and Reeves are not the only GOP governors moving fast in ending the restrictions, several other governors have recently acted to roll them back. On February 12, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte lifted his statewide mask mandate.

On February 8, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds lifted Iowa’s statewide mask mandate along with several other restrictions. On February 22, North Dakota took it a step further. Its legislative body took the bold step in voting to make mask mandates illegal. As of March 2, there are now 16 states that no longer have statewide mask orders.

However, across the political divide, there remains no end in sight to the corona madness. Much of the Left continues to embrace and root on endless COVID-19 restrictions, and the hijacking of individual rights in the name of a virus. Governor Gavin Newsom of California took to Twitter in describing the end of restrictions as “absolutely reckless.”

It took long enough, but it’s now official: Governors who continue to impose lockdowns and mask mandates are fast becoming as popular as Red Sox fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, at least in half of the country. The internal polling is out, and the draconian restrictions are being abandoned in droves. History will not be kind to the remaining high-handed holdouts.”

We Have To Choose:  Liberty or Lockdown?

Jeffrey A. Tucker, Editorial Director of the American Institute for Economic Research, is the author of Liberty or Lockdown. The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe is by Jay W. Richards Ph.D., William M. Briggs Ph.D., and Douglas Axe Ph.D. Corona, False Alarm? Facts and Figures is an Amazon Best Seller by Karina Reiss Ph.D. and Sucharit Bhakdi MD.

Amazon Descriptions

“Jeffrey Tucker is well known as the author of many informative and beloved articles and books on the subject of human freedom. Now he’s turned his attention to the most shocking and widespread violation of human freedom in our times: the authoritarian lockdown of society on the pretense that it is necessary in the face of a novel virus….The result is clear: there is no justification for the lockdowns.
It’s liberty or lockdown. We have to choose.”

“The human cost of the emergency response to COVID-19 has far outweighed the benefits. That’s the sobering verdict of a trio of scholars —a biologist, a statistician, and a philosopher— in this comprehensive assessment of the worst panic-induced disaster in history. As the media fanned the flames of panic, government officials and anew elite of scientific experts ignored the established protocols for mitigating a dangerous disease.

Instead, they shut down the world economy, closed every school, confined citizens to their homes, and threatened to enforce a regime of extreme social distancing indefinitely. And the American public—amazingly enough—complied without protest…. In the early spring of 2020, the panic of government officials, the hysteria of the media, and the hubris of suddenly powerful scientists produced a worldwide calamity. The Price of Panic is the essential book for understanding what happened and how to avoid repeating our deadly mistakes.”

Lessons of The Lockdown

Amazon’s description says:

“Does the race for vaccine development make sense? What are the chances of success? Will the vaccine be safe? Will people accept it?? In June 2020, Corona, False Alarm? exploded into the German market, selling 200,000 copies and 75,000 e-books in the first six weeks.

No other topic dominates our attention as much as coronavirus and COVID-19, the infectious disease it triggers. There’s been a global deluge of contradictory opinions, fake news, and politically controlled information. Differing views on the dangers posed by the pandemic have led to deep division and confusion, within governments, society, and even among friends and family.

In Corona, False Alarm?, award-winning researchers Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi and Dr. Karina Reiss give clarity to these confusing and stressful times. They offer analysis of whether radical protective measures ― including lockdown, social distancing, and mandatory masking ― have been justified, and what the ramifications have been for society, the economy, and public health. Dr. Bhakdi and Dr. Reiss provide dates, facts, and background information, including:

• How Covid-19 compares with previous coronaviruses and the flu virus
• What infection numbers and the death rate really tell us
• The challenges around lockdown: Were the protective measures justified?
• Mandatory mask-wearing: Does the science support it?

Vaccines: What are the chances of success? What are the risks? Corona, False Alarm? provides you with sound information and substantiated facts―and encourages you to form your own opinion on the corona crisis.”

The March 2 article Lockdowns Could Reshape American Politics for a Generation, or Several is by Tucker and points out:

“Lockdowns or not? That’s been the primary question for social, economic, and political organizations for the past year. It’s a new question for humanity. Lockdowns were previously unconscionable and contrary to settle public-health practice. Suddenly, and for reasons never explained, that changed. Then everything changed.

[Note: the day I filed this article, the governor of Texas announced a complete repeal of all lockdowns, including mask mandates, curfews, capacity limits, and quarantines.]

Never before has such a globalized and comprehensive regime of closures, curfews, quarantines, travel restrictions, and surveillance been deployed for any excuse much less under the guise of virus control. A century of high-level public health practice never deployed anything like this, and that’s for a reason. No matter how bad the virus, such policies turn a challenge into a catastrophe.

Everyone has been put to the test – not only politicians and public intellectuals but everyone who has suffered under these strictures. A small group of people want everyone else to accept lockdowns as a fait accompli, just something that has to happen when a new virus comes along, as if it is not the permanent state of human experience to live amidst forever mutating pathogens.  You can quickly identify the venues that do not want us to ask fundamental questions.”

Freedom-Loving Governors Are American Heroes

The article adds:

“The questions will not go away. Nor should they. Are lockdowns effective? No. Even if they were, are they justified given how they upend everything we previously believed about liberty, equality, democracy, property, and law? No.

What if a sizable portion of the American public regards lockdowns are both ineffective and unjust?

The political ground beneath our feet will begin to quake. What can people do to prevent them from happening again? There must be ironclad promises never to go down this road again, and there might even be a need for those responsible to compensate their victims. Now one year into this disaster, my worry that humanity would just accept this and move on is proving unwarranted. We’ve been prevented from gathering in groups for most of the year but people are starting to creep out of their homes and communities and talking to neighbors, friends, and other groups. People are discovering that there is plenty of dissent out there, and it stretches across the partisan divide.”

The article shows there are two heroes emerging from this unprecedented experiment – the governors who stood for freedom, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

The article points out:

“At the famous CPAC event last week in Florida, the audience roared in approval as speaker after speaker condemned the lockdowns. The two leading stars of the Republican Party apart from Trump are the most anti-lockdown of the governors. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, previously obscure, has become a mega-star in this world because she was the only governor of any US state that never experimented with business closures or stay-at-home orders. She trusted freedom and the rule of law.

At the event, Governor Noem admitted that she was shocked that she was alone in this since she takes it for granted that freedom is the primary American value. The second person is Ron DeSantis of Florida, who more than any other governor was willing to listen to scientists and learn from them, even when doing so ran contrary to his own previous shutdown orders. He opened up the whole state in September, and the virus outcomes in Florida are much better than still-closed California (to say nothing of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts).

The main point is that this CPAC crowd – the largest gathering in Republican circles since pre-election rallies – was deeply animated by the anti-lockdown message. If we can infer that the sensibilities of this group indicate something about public opinion more broadly, we could be looking at a generation-defining political and intellectual issue.”

Why Did Americans Put Up With This Tyranny?

The article shows how waking up now from the insanity of locking down a nation for a year can help bridge the gap between Left and Right. It adds:

“For strange reasons of timing and loss of principle, the ‘woke’ left found itself mixed up in lockdown politics. By the spring of 2020, many of them lined up with policies that violate the very rights they had spent decades defending. So much for the Bill of Rights, the freedom of movement, the appreciation for the classless society, and so on. The left lost its soul during 2020, and thereby alienated multitudes of sane lefties who watched in horror as their own tribe abandoned them in favor of the authoritarianism they had long decried.

Lockdown vs not: this has the capacity to be a theme that will resonate far into the future. It also unites people on the political “right” again with small business, genuine civil libertarians, and champions of religious liberty. It permits the “left” to again find its voice for human rights and freedoms. For that matter, they do not have to be activists; they only need to be people who do not want their houses of worship padlocked, their business closed and bankrupted, or their speech curtailed.”

The article adds:

“Then you have the increasingly ridiculous “track-and-trace” regime that pretends to hunt down and control the virus, even though the CDC now speculates that as many as 1 in 4 or perhaps 1 in 3 people have caught this virus with a 99.8% survival rate (it approaches 100% for people under 50 years of age). Get a positive test (never mind that more than half or more could be false positives) and you find yourself kicked out of school and work for two weeks, stigmatized like the lepers in the bible. It’s grotesque and pre-modern, and it has no public-health benefit.

Why have the people put up with this? Under normal conditions, they never would have. None of this would have been possible. The one reason they did this time: fear. Fear of getting sick and dying or, if not dying, experiencing permanent health effects. This emotion can last far longer than one might think. But eventually emotions do catch up with facts, among which is that the danger of severe outcomes was wildly exaggerated and the lockdowns achieved nothing in terms of disease mitigation.”

The article points out:

“You mean all this suffering and horror was for naught? Once that realization dawns, fear turns to anger, and anger to action. If you understand that dynamic, you can see why the architects of lockdowns from Dr. Fauci to the CDC are doing their best to delay that dawning, with daily doses of alarmism designed to keep people hiding in their homes.

The fear cannot last. When it breaks, we are going to see multitudes of people – small business owners and workers, parents of kids in school, patients who couldn’t see their families while in the hospital, adults with parents in long-term care facilities from which they’ve been locked down, families who canceled one vacation after another, people of faith whose religious communities were shattered, and all those people who were forced for the better part of a year to live life with zero fun or entertainment outside the confines of their homes – lash out at those who did this to us. And they will be inspired to understand why and make sure nothing like this happens again.

We might have lost as much as one year from American life expectancy, the biggest drop since 1943, and not only or even mainly from Covid. For a full year, Americans have avoided doctors, dentists, and hospitals, and their health has sunk further and further, with drug overdoses and other substance abuse at record highs. The bad news on suicides will continue to pour in month after month.”

The article concludes

“It was all predicted. It all happened, even worse than we predicted. Meanwhile our cities are in shambles. The arts are wrecked. The population is demoralized….

None of this will soon be forgotten. It’s the trauma of our lives. They stole our freedom, our happiness, our way of life, and attempted to replace them all with a stern regime with puritan sensibilities that rivalled the Taliban, forcing the whole population to hide their faces and live in fear of the American Mandarins. And it was done not by scientific consensus but rather by a small number of lockdowners in cooperation with risk-averse politicians and bureaucrats. A closer look reveals that actual published experts on Covid are far more supportive of the Great Barrington Declaration than we had been led to believe.

Karma is already turning on the lockdowners, from reporters to politicians around the country. People like Cuomo, de Blasio, and Newsom are falling from grace for stated reasons other than lockdowns but the abusers of all sorts eventually pay a price for their egregious behavior, one way or another. The list of people who will experience career disruption for what they have done to our communities and our country is very long.… While the virus is invisible, the people who dreamed up and enforced lockdowns that wrecked the country are highly visible. They have names and careers, and they are right to be very worried about their futures.

Anti-lockdownism need not be partisan. The victims of these policies are all over the political map. They are united only in their general belief in human rights, constitutional restraints on government, and the need to keep society functioning in the midst of a health crisis. This opinion is not and should not be controversial. There is never a good excuse to turn on basic Enlightenment values in favor of feudal forms of political organization and coerced social management. Never. A commitment to that principle, as a first principle, could dramatically realign American intellectual and political life.”

Top image: Screen grab, CNBC

Neenah Payne writes for Activist Post and Natural Blaze

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