Yesterday The American Spectator published my article below regarding Florida’s approach to the Covid 19 pandemic. It’s been linked to by my friends at Powerline as well as Real Clear Politics and has generated a fair amount of controversy.

Here’s my favorite reader comment so far on the AmSpec website:

“Apparently any kind of lawless trash can become a state or federal prosecutor.”

I think that may have been written by one of my law school profs under a nom de internet.

By the way, that’s not me in the picture above.

Anyhow, hope you enjoy the article.

Life in DeSantis’s Florida: Time Travel to America

Biden and Democrat governors’ approach couldn’t be more different than the one this Republican governor has taken.

At the end of January I watched a video message from the commissioners of the suburban Philadelphia county where my wife and I reside. According to them, it may take Pennsylvania up to a year to administer COVID vaccinations to all persons over the age of 65. We oldsters (my wife and I are 76) were told to register with the county and prepare for a long wait.

This information decided the issue of whether or not we should take up residence in Florida for the remaining winter months. Not only would the weather be more congenial, according to our Florida friends, but our chances of receiving the COVID vaccine in a timely manner also would increase exponentially.

And, in fact, within 11 days of our arrival in Florida, we received our first jabs of the Moderna vaccine and will receive our second doses in mid-March. We are now among the 2,355,792 persons who have been vaccinated in Florida as of February 13, 2021.

The comparison between Florida’s efficient handling of COVID vaccinations, under the leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, and that of Pennsylvania, under Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf, could not be more telling. And the favorable comparisons don’t end there.

Pennsylvania has been in a COVID lockdown for almost a year. During that time, lives, livelihoods, and businesses have been destroyed en masse because state health authorities deemed the lockdown to be a necessary means of reducing the rate of COVID infections. Nevertheless, COVID has spread throughout Pennsylvania and, thanks to the state’s callous and ill-advised decree that forced nursing homes to accept COVID patients, a shockingly high and avoidable number of its senior citizens in long-term care facilities have died.

Pictured above is former Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, who in May 2020 instigated and implemented the Wolf administration’s policy requiring long-term care facilities to accept COVID patients. Did Levine think that this directive would put elderly nursing home residents at increased risk of harm? Apparently so, since, at the same time that she issued the directive, she moved her own mother out of a nursing home and into a hotel.

When questioned about this, the Secretary of Health responded that the move was made at her mother’s request, as if that somehow explained her hypocrisy.

Now comes word that Joe Biden has selected Levine to be his assistant secretary of health. According to USA Today, the nomination is historic since Levine will likely be the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

“Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond,” Biden said in a statement. “She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”

Levine’s failed record in Pennsylvania proves otherwise, but why let facts get in the way of making identity politics history?

In contrast to Levine’s dismal performance, Florida officials elected to keep COVID patients out of nursing homes despite the possibility that doing so might stress the state’s hospital facilities. As it turned out, this was the right call. Florida’s most vulnerable citizens in nursing homes have been spared state-mandated exposure to COVID, and the state’s hospitals have maintained adequate patient capacity.

While Pennsylvania’s economy and people continue to suffer under lockdown, Florida — while requiring reasonable public health measures — is wide open for business. People here are free to patronize restaurants, bars, hotels, and enterprises of all types and sizes. This place is booming, and, once here, it doesn’t take long to realize just how unnatural, depressing, debilitating, and destructive life in lockdown has been.

Being in Florida has been like traveling back in time to the America that existed before COVID. It’s liberating and heartening to see people living, working, and going about publicly exercising what were once their unquestioned and fundamental rights to earn a living, to move about, and to associate with one another freely.

So what has been the response of the Biden regime to the Florida success story? According to this report on RealRawNews.com of a conversation with Gov. DeSantis and federal health officials, Joe Biden threatened to ban domestic travel to and from Florida purportedly in order to prevent the spread of COVID. The article states that, in opposing this unconstitutional and outrageous threat, DeSantis refused to address Biden as “president” and told him to “go f*** himself.”

Whether or not that last part is true, Gov. DeSantis confirmed the rest of the report on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures Fox broadcast. His appearance is linked below. Watch and listen closely to his cogent summary of recent events in which he brings into sharp focus the difference between his state’s intelligent and successful approach to the COVID pandemic and the abysmal results achieved by Democrat leadership elsewhere. It will help you understand the shameful, shocking, and base politics behind Biden’s vindictive and demented threat to ban travel to and from Florida.

It appears that there is no limit to the malign purposes to which the Biden regime will use the COVID pandemic to damage the opposition party and strengthen the regime’s shaky hold on power. The fact that Biden would brazenly threaten to shut down travel to and from Florida may correctly be seen as a sign that, thanks to their successful massive use of unverified and unverifiable mail-in ballots and the unqualified support of the media, academia, Big Tech Robber Barons, and major woke elements of corporate America, the Democrats believe that they have the formula for “winning” elections and maintaining control of the government regardless of how many of the middle and working class they offend, harm, or abuse. In short, the consent of the governed appears to be but an antiquated curiosity to those now in power and who intend to jam a brave new progressive utopia down the gagging throats of 74,000,000 unwilling Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump.

In doing so, as they pursue their arrogant and destructive course, Biden and his supporters are risking a catastrophic societal backlash that, by comparison, will make the Capitol Hill incursion look like a frat boy panty raid.

George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor. He blogs at knowledgeisgood.net and many be reached at kignet1@gmail.com.