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What Happened When the Georgia Governor Tried to Open the State?

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER  

The journalists have fallen down on the job. To say the least.

Three years ago, all normal rights and liberties of the people were trampled on by governments everywhere. It was all for naught. The virus came and became endemic as it always would in any case. And as societies opened up gradually, we were left with unbearable carnage: economic, cultural, and public health. The damages continue to hammer the world in the form of health and economic losses, and now we face a growing financial and banking crisis.

One might assume that professional journalists would be all over this, digging into every nook and cranny to discover precisely how all this came to be. Alas, there is a weird game of pretend going on in the mainstream press: pretend lockdowns were fine, pretend the shots worked, and pretend that today’s shattered politics and economics have nothing to do with the outrageous actions that were perpetuated on people the world over.

As a result of this tremendously odd conspiracy of silence, the journalistic duty has fallen to people independent of the mainstream, writing for Brownstone, Substack, and a handful of other venues.

And yet, every once in a while, something does leak through in a large venue. That happened this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. The opinion page editor James Taranto took a trip to Georgia to talk with Governor Brian Kemp. The result is “Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior.”

The thesis is that Kemp has been battling woke culture longer than anyone else while rarely getting the credit.

That’s interesting but not the real revelation of the piece. What it really does is dig deeply into the most interesting aspect of the last three years: how it came to be that Georgia was the first state to open following lockdowns and how the White House responded. On this subject, the piece absolutely breaks new ground, so much so that it is worth quoting the relevant passages here.

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!”

What’s utterly remarkable here is that readers gain an inside look into the difficult spot into which Trump’s White House had placed Republican governors. The whole machinery of DC had been marshaled with Trump’s approval. The order read: “indoor and outdoor venues where people can congregate should be closed.” He issued this order on March 16 and expected full compliance, and then lobbied for trillions in welfare to the states to make sure they stayed locked down.

Only South Dakota with Kristy Noem refused. And for that she was dragged through the mud of media lies for two years because she allowed motorcyclists, for example, to organize and ride in her state. The fake studies coming out about the Sturgis bike rallies set a new low standard for real-time science.

Georgia is important because it was the first state to open. Trump tweeted his opposition to this move both in general and then, two weeks later, in opposition to Kemp’s opening.

Every bit of documentation absolutely contradicts Trump’s claim that he “left that decision up to the Governors” as a matter of his own intention. It was his intention to achieve what he later bragged he had done, which is “turned it off.”

I won’t belabor this anymore because we’ve covered this in more detail here and here.

And yet for weeks now, Trump has been telling visitors to Mar-a-Lago, and his coterie has backed him up, that he never locked down and only people like Kemp and DeSantis did this over his objections. Daily I get calls from people who are stunned that this outright attempt to falsify history is happening. But these days, it is just part of public life, I suppose.

This is why we must be grateful for people like Taranto for digging more deeply into the actual history of what happened in those fateful months from 2020 when life itself was completely upended by dreadful decision-making from the White House. If we had more journalists interested in what actually happened, rather than just pretending that either what happened was perfectly normal or that it didn’t happen at all, we would be far closer to getting to the truth, and making sure that such a calamity never repeats itself.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Freedom Convoy

Trudeau’s use of Emergencies Act has cost taxpayers $73 million thus far

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Expenses for the Emergencies Act, the use of which a federal court ruled ‘not justified,’ included $17.5 million for a judicial inquiry, $400,000 for charter flights and $1.3 million for hotel rooms for out-of-town RCMP officers.

The Liberal government’s use of the Emergencies Act against the 2022 Freedom Convoy has cost Canadian taxpayers over $73 million thus far. 

According to newly released records obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s enactment of the Emergencies Act, the use of which has since been ruled “not justified” by a federal court, to drive out Freedom Convoy protestors from Ottawa in 2022, cost the Department of Public Safety $73,550,568.  

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the $73 million figure was part of records released by the department at the request of Conservative MP Ziad Aboultaif, and despite its high number, is not the final account.

“With regard to enactment of the Emergencies Act in 2022, what was the cost burden for the government?” Conservative MP Ziad Aboultaif asked.  

“Cost associated with fiscal year 2023-2024 are still to be determined,” the department responded.  

According to the Department of Public Safety, most of the public safety expenses were attributed to local authorities in Ottawa and Windsor, Ontario.  

“It should be noted additional funding allocated by the government to Ottawa and its partners as well as Windsor were not specifically as a result of the Emergencies Act invocation but meant to compensate both municipalities for the extraordinary expenses incurred during and after the protracted blockades,” the report said. 

Other expenses included $17.5 million for a judicial inquiry, $400,000 for charter flights, and $1.3 million for hotel rooms for out-of-town RCMP officers.  

The costs were incurred after Trudeau enacted the Act on February 14, 2022 to shut down the Freedom Convoy protest which took place in Ottawa.  

At the time, the use of the Act was justified by claims that the protest was “violent,” a claim that has still gone unsubstantiated.

In fact, videos of the protest against COVID regulations and vaccine mandates show Canadians from across the country gathering outside Parliament engaged in dancing, street hockey, and other family-friendly activities.

Indeed, the only acts of violence caught on video were carried out against the protesters after the Trudeau government directed police to end the protest. One such video showed an elderly women being trampled by a police horse.   

Recently, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that Trudeau was “not justified” in invoking the Emergencies Act.

However, the Trudeau government has doubled down on its heavy-handed response to citizen protesters, filing an appeal with the Federal Court of Appeal – a court where 10 of the 15 sitting judges were appointed by Trudeau.

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COVID-19

Pro-freedom Canadian nurse gets two years probation for protesting COVID restrictions

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Ontario nurse Kristen Nagle

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Ontario nurse Kristen Nagle, a well-known figure in Canada’s pro-freedom movement during COVID, said her sentence of two-years probation is effectively a way for the government to silence her for the foreseeable future.

A Canadian nurse found guilty of violating Ontario’s COVID rules for participating in an anti-lockdown rally and speaking out against COVID mandates says despite scoring a recent “half-win” in court, her two-year probation sentence is designed to stop her from “speaking out or going against public health measures.”   

“The Crown wanted an egregious amount of $50,000. They saw my GiveSendGo, they saw the support, they saw that I was not deterred by the $20,000 sentencing and so they wanted to sentence me for $50,000- and two-years’ probation,” said Canadian nurse Kristen Nagle in a Facebook video posted on March 21.   

“So, kind of a half-win, the JP (justice of peace) agreed to the two years’ probation, I don’t really know what that looks like, what that means yet, but I’m under two years’ probation, I don’t know, and $7,500. And $7,500, is really not that bad compared to $50,000.” 

Nagle was heavily involved with the activist group Canadian Frontline Nurses and became a well-known face from those in the medical community in Canada who protested both the mRNA COVID jabs and lockdown dictates imposed by all levels of government.  

She worked at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) in Ontario before being terminated in 2021 for attending anti-lockdown rallies in 2020. She resigned from the College of Nurses of Ontario in January 2023. 

Nagle was found guilty by a court in February for violating Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Reopening Ontario Act (RAO), after she attended and spoke at an anti-lockdown rally on January 22, 2022, in London, Ontario.  

At the end of March, a court ruled against the Crown’s requested $50,000 fine, and instead fined Nagle $7,500, plus a victim surcharge, which brought the total to $9,375, along with two years’ probation.  

The event that led to Nagle being charged had a crowd size of some 150 people, which was over the allowed 10-person limit that was in place at the time. 

Nagle’s current GiveSendGo fundraising page lists regular updates regarding the various charges incurred for speaking out against COVID mandates.  

Probation sentence a tool to discourage ‘speaking out,’ nurse says

Nagle said her two-year probation now means she “[c]annot commit a crime,” and “must keep the peace” and be on “good behavior and not commit the same offense,” which she said would impede her ability to speak freely.  

“It just seems crazy that when this probation is over it will be 2026! That to me just seemed absurd to think this is still looming in the background until then,” she noted in a recent email to her followers. 

“It was difficult to listen to them talk about the possibility of the next thing, and that we can’t have people going against public health measures in a crisis. It would be naive of them to think that we won’t find ourselves in something similar again, so this probation is to stop me from speaking out or going against public health measures should another ‘public health emergency’ find us again,” she added. 

She also thanked everyone for their support in helping her, as well as everyone’s “encouragement, prayers, and financial contributions throughout the years!” 

“You have no idea how much it has meant to me and my family and lifted up my spirits when I thought I could not go on!” she wrote in her email. 

“Thank you for everything! It has meant more to me than words I am able to express!” 

Earlier this year, Nagel was also found guilty of two charges under the RAO for attending as well as organizing another rally in November of 2020. She was fined $20,000. 

Another charge against Nagle for attending an anti-lockdown protest was withdrawn. 

In 2022, she was fined $10,000 for attending an Easter church service during Ontario’s COVID lockdowns in the spring of 2021, at the Aylmer Church of God. She appealed the fine, which was later reduced to $3,750.  

As recently reported by LifeSiteNews, some healthcare workers who refused to get the COVID jabs were successful in getting positive rulings from arbitrators. 

Indeed, two workers from a Toronto area hospital who chose not to get the COVID shots and were then fired from their jobs were wrongfully terminated, an arbitrator ruled. 

Many other recent rulings have gone in favor of those who chose to not get the shots and were fired from their jobs as a result. 

Draconian COVID mandates, including those surrounding the experimental mRNA vaccines, were imposed by both the provincial Ford government as well as the federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

In April 2021, the Ontario provincial government once again increased its COVID measures and declared a state of emergency over rising cases of the virus. It then put in place a complete ban on all outdoor gatherings that, in effect, made peaceful protests illegal in the province. 

COVID vaccine mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children. 

The jabs also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result of this, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them. 

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