Ignorance of The Scientific Method, and willful distortion of the data to serve political ends is a common theme in these pages, but the attacks on Governor DeSantis (my current 2024 front-runner) and his rational approach to the Wuhan flu epidemic in Florida is particularly egregious.
Ron DeSantis Versus the “Party of Science.”
In May 2020, when DeSantis began reopening his state, ten Democrats from Florida’s congressional delegation wrote him a scathing open letter warning that “rushed reopening” might increase “human loss.” They accused DeSantis of resisting “science-based and data-driven mitigation strategies.” The governor gained a new nickname, which his critics plastered on billboards: “DeathSantis.” Fast-forward ten months. Scientific breakthroughs—not mask mandates or school closures, but vaccines developed through Operation Warp Speed—are bringing the pandemic under control. To say Florida has done better than expected is an understatement. With the third-largest (and second-oldest) population in the country, Florida ranks #27 in COVID-19 deaths per capita. The three states with the highest rate of COVID-19 deaths are New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. All three had far more restrictive and lengthier lockdowns than Florida. And all three are run by Democrats. As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial put it, the data bring “vindication for Ron DeSantis.” Even a New York Times headline admitted, “I’d much rather be in Florida.”
At this point any claim that a policy is “science based” is akin to it being “commonsense,” or “for the children.”
If the Democrat party apparatus had its druthers, we would have our own version of the Soviet era Article 70, complete with criminal penalties for disagreeing with the orthodoxy. Their corporate partners already do that, so it is small step from Twitter deplatforming people for wrongthink about Wuhan flu to the government doing the same.
Free speech, no matter its content is at the pinnacle of Western philosophy; it took us 2,500 years to get there and just a few years to destroy it. Think back to the 1970s, when the ACLU defended the right of a few Nazi nutters to march in Skokie Illinois, a town with many Holocaust survivors. As abhorrent as it may seem, that is free speech. But today we have lost all connection to the ideals of freedom and liberty that the Western world nurtured and defended for so long. Religion was the first brick knocked out of the foundation of Western culture, Science came next, and what will be the next target of our new anti-freedom overlords?
