April 29, 2025

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Actual headline (still up) at The Atlantic — Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.

Three weeks later, The Week reported that the Mull’s dark dreams fortunately did not come true: We should be grateful for good news in Georgia.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Atlanta is not burning. Bodies are not piled up in the streets. Hospitals in Georgia are not being overwhelmed; in fact, they are virtually empty. There is no mad rush for ventilators (remember those?). Instead, men, women, and children in the Peach State are returning to some semblance of normal life: working outside their homes, going to restaurants and bars, getting haircuts, exercising, and most important, spending time with their friends and families and worshipping God. The opening that began more than three weeks ago is continuing apace.

Oh, my apologies, you were waiting for bad news? Sorry, I forgot, we were actually not supposed to be rooting for the virus. Despite the apparent relish behind headlines like “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” one assumes that most Americans, even the ones most committed to omnidirectional prophecies of doom, were actually hoping this would happen. While it really is a shame that we do not get to gloat about the cravenness and stupidity of yet another GOP politician, I think on balance most of us will be glad to hear that Gov. Brian Kemp was not badly wrong here.

What is happening instead of the widely predicted bloodbath? Confirmed cases of the virus are obviously increasing (though the actual rolling weekly average of new ones have been headed down for nearly a month) while deaths remain more or less flat. This is in fact what happens when you test more people for a disease that is not fatal or even particularly serious for the vast majority of those who contract it, for which the median age of death is higher than the American life expectancy.

How was this possible? One answer is that the lockdown did not in fact do what it was supposed to do, which is to say, meaningfully impede transmission of the virus. In fact, data both from states like Georgia and from abroad suggests that the lifting of lockdowns is positively correlated with a decrease in rates of infection. This could be because lockdowns are inherently ineffective at slowing down a disease whose spread appears to be largely intrafamilial and nosocomial.

Georgia’s Republican governor earned bipartisan attacks when he wisely reopened his state in late April: Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior.

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

Of course, by 2023, Trump was far from the only former official distancing himself from the debacle of 2020: Anthony Fauci Says Don’t Blame Him for COVID Lockdowns and School Closures.

Amanda Hull of the Atlantic’s about-face was much faster, taking only a month: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

HMM:

Another thread suggested that a huge surge in solar power generation was responsible. If true, maybe Madrid would rather people not know that.

Posted at 7:43 am by Stephen Green

KURT SCHLICHTER: Just Bomb Iran Already.

Nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles are a direct threat to the United States of America, as well as our friends and allies around the world. That’s indisputable. Those hand-waving away the mullahs’ sordid track record of murder and atrocity committed in the name of that bizarre dictatorship are simply not facing reality.

And I like a lot of the people doing that hand-waving. I respect them, and their opinions should be considered. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m willing to be talked out of this. I would prefer not to go to war. But I’d also prefer not to be obliterated by a bunch of lunatics trying to resuscitate the 53rd missing ayatollah or whatever the hell they’re on about. These guys hate us and want us dead. Pretending that America doesn’t have enemies around the world who want to butcher us is both crazy and wrong, and we dare not be guided by that childlike and sophomoric fantasy.

Nor do I want to hear any crap about how “America started it.” It’s objectively false – we did not start this, except in the sense we refuse to embrace their brand of primitive fanaticism – but I don’t care if we did. You don’t ever get to threaten or kill Americans, two things these savages have been doing for nearly half a century. They took our people hostage in 1979, and eight of our men were killed trying to rescue them. They were behind the Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American diplomats and Marines. They backed terrorists who slaughtered Americans around the world. They armed and led the Shia thugs who maimed or killed thousands of our troops in Iraq. Payback is in order.

We talk a lot about a Jacksonian foreign policy, where America doesn’t go looking for trouble. But there’s another side to that coin. And that side depicts us wiping out anybody who dares kill Americans. The fact that we’ve allowed these barbarians to murder our people without retaliation is not only a moral disgrace but an invitation for every psychopath with a religious vision and an IED to make some Americans dead.

This is intolerable. The proper state of the world is one in which the mere thought of harming an American never arises because of the certainty that to do so will bring death to the terrorists, to everybody around the terrorists, and to everybody who helped the terrorists.

Andrew Jackson wasn’t just a big talker. If you messed with him, you died.

Read the whole thing.

The Middle East as a whole might become a lot less dangerous with fewer mullahs in Tehran.

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green 7

STANDING UP AGAINST HATE, BIGOTRY, AND DISCRIMINATION: Trump Administration Launches Probes of Harvard Law Review’s Racial Preferences: The Education Department and HHS will investigate whether the journal violated civil rights law. “The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services will conduct separate investigations of the university after the Washington Free Beacon published a news report Friday revealing that the law review uses race to select both editors and articles for publication. The report was based on a trove of internal documents.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 8

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Amazon launches its first satellites to rival Starlink. “Amazon’s Kuiper broadband internet constellation is starting to take shape, with its first batch of satellites shipped and deployed into space on Monday. The launch is just the first of 80 that Amazon has lined up to take all 3,236 Project Kuiper satellites into low-Earth orbit as part of the retail giant’s effort to compete with Starlink — SpaceX’s market-dominating satellite internet business.”

The launch was by ULA, not by Blue Origin.

Posted at 7:29 am by Glenn Reynolds 2

HEY, IT’S AN EASY MISTAKE TO MAKE. COULD HAPPEN TO ANYBODY: Nike is getting hammered for ‘tone-deaf’ ad at London Marathon: ‘Heads need to roll.’

The company issued an apology over the ad.

Nike’s latest advertisement at the London Marathon was lambasted as tone-deaf and completely disrespectful.

The red-colored sign read, “Never again. Until next year.” It was supposed to refer to the spirit of runners finishing a trial and returning the next year, but many took it as an insult to the victims of the Holocaust.

Among the critics was billionaire investor Bill Ackman.

“The idea that @Nike would make light of the holocaust using Hitler-red imagery in a post-October 7th world is stunning. Heads need to roll. WTF Nike?” he posted.

“I assume that this was unintentional, but it is hard to imagine that there was no one at @Nike, on the marketing team, at their advertising firm, banner manufacture etc. who didn’t know or who didn’t think to Google the words ‘Never again,'” he added in a second tweet.

“I’m guessing it’s not super fun in the halls of @Nike right now. So many unforced errors. Never again? WTAF was this marketing person thinking?? A purge of mid level marketers must be underway. Plus some high level ones,” replied XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey.

“What on earth was @Nike thinking? They posted this enormous billboard in London for the London Marathon, just days after Holocaust Remembrance Day, but not for Holocaust Remembrance Day,” wrote pro-Israel author Aviva Klompas.

How many of layers of executives had to sign off on such a campaign?

Flashback to 2019, when Nike issued a pair of Betsy Ross-flag embedded sneakers, likely only so that uber-woke Nike endorser Colin Kaepernick could dunk on them, to coincide with the Fourth of July. In Nike’s collective mind, this is evil and “offensive:”

But “Never Again. Until Next Year,” on a red background, is perfectly acceptable to Nike. Also, pay no attention to who makes the corporation’s sneakers. Or as Deadspin deadpanned in 2020: “Nike would very much like to keep its slave labor, thank you.”

Related: Meet the Nike Marketing Specialist Who Says Israel, Not Hamas, Is ‘Massacring Civilians.’

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll 24

JEFFREY CARTER: Being Late To The Party Actually Means You Never Got An Invite. “China has cities to nowhere and an underperforming economy right now. It has debt. But if it wins the AI/Robotics/Quantum race, it won’t matter. I don’t think the world understands this, nor does much of it care. In fact, some of them are rooting for China because they worship centralization. . . . The US has always been about opportunity. We don’t wait for the meeting to end and for the decision to be made. You can sit on the porch steps and talk about it, or you can just do it. Your choice. You won’t have that choice if China is in control. They will choose. The party velvet rope will be put up, and while they are getting bottle service courtesy of you, you will be excluded.”

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 5