Governor DeSantis’s resounding victory in Florida is a victory for lockdown sceptics, according to Marshall Auerback in UnHerd. Here’s his article in full:
To paraphrase a famous Sun headline, it was Covid Wot Won It for the Republicans in at least one of last night’s midterm races, even if the widely predicted “red wave” turned out to be more of a dribble. It’s true, in the strict sense, that the immediate focus of voters featured concerns about the rising cost of living, spiralling crime (especially in many blue cities), immigration, and abortion. But all of this must be seen in the context of a pandemic response that ultimately created the conditions for these issues to take root and spread.
The lockdowns precipitated huge economic dislocations, notably supply-chain gaps that in turn created significant inflationary pressures. The stimulus package succeeded beyond policymakers’ wildest dreams, but those same policymakers, from Biden to the Democratic-controlled Congress downward, ignored the changing economic context as the country came out of the pandemic. Instead, the White House and Fed fuelled inflation further by spending nearly $5 trillion in Covid relief.
It’s therefore easy to see why Joe Biden focused on the supposed threat to democracy posed by ‘MAGA’ Republicans rather than inflation during campaigning. That charge might have had more force had Democrats not engaged in a cynical game of intervening in Republican primaries, using party funds to promote some of those same far-Right candidates in GOP primaries.
The strategy has worked better than expected, but the economy has not improved. In fact, it has steadily deteriorated, particularly after the Federal Reserve (which had long dismissed price pressures as “transitory”) belatedly responded by aggressively raising rates. This move created havoc in the housing market and added additional stress to American consumers, who in 2021 increased their personal debt by $1 trillion, the biggest annual increase since 2007.
No wonder, then, that the economy was a top concern for a majority of US voters. But Covid also exposed something else to Americans: the policies pushed by social justice advocates during the pandemic. Being at home with their children, parents were able to see in a way they never had before the hyper-liberal curriculum being foisted on their children: Seattle public schools using K-5 gender lessons to teach kindergarten-age children about transitioning and pronouns being one prominent example. As difficult a time as it was for adults, a plethora of studies showed that young children and adolescents were clearly among the people most negatively impacted, in various ways, by the pandemic lockdowns. These were key factors contributing to Republican Glenn Youngkin’s surprise defeat of the heavy favourite Terry McAuliffe in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial race. It was an early warning ignored by the Democrats.
That is why Republicans were so keen to beat the Covid drum on the eve of the election. Conservative columnist Ann Coulter sent her readers a succinct reminder by linking to a host of lockdown measures that created unprecedented disruptions to American lives for almost three years; likewise, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem a possible Vice Presidential candidate for Donald Trump, made hay of this issue. Noted lockdown sceptic Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, long treated as a punching bag by the media for eschewing “expert” advice, is likely to use Florida’s recovery as a signature policy to promote his own presidential run, especially after romping home in his gubernatorial re-election race.
If this wasn’t enough to remind Democrats that voters are sick and tired of being scolded about mask-wearing and incessant reminders that Covid is still very much with us, then consider that we are now a few months into the bivalent booster vaccination campaign, and uptake remains less enthusiastic than ever.
It may not be called a Covid election, but these midterms are a clear snapshot of how the pandemic has reoriented American politics. The Democrats may get away with it this time. They will not be so lucky in 2024.
Stop Press: The Wall St Journal agrees, declaring that DeSantis’s “huge re-election victory vindicates his pandemic policies”.
Stop Press 2: Watch an extract from DeSantis’s victory speech, in which he says Florida is where woke comes to die.
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It’s significant and frightening how little UK politicians care about free speech and the culture war in general. They’re quite happy to see an unpoliced left wing lynch mob terrorise ordinary people.
We need an absolute free speech Act of Parliament that overrides all ‘hate speech’ laws. There are already plenty of anti-incitement laws. We’re at the point where you can be arrested for speaking at Hyde Park Corner, which proves how far we’ve fallen.
Conservative MPs are now mostly liberal leftists, Conservative in name only. We need a populist party to emerge and kill the Tories off.
Yes, I’m in total agreement. This ‘uniparty’ bullcrap has gone on for too long. At this stage the name ‘Conservative Party’ ought to be had up on trade descriptions!
Yes but Free Speech is dangerous to totalitarians. They need always to control the language to keep themselves in control of the argument. What free people must say is this ———-“I have an education and I own a dictionary and I will choose my own words and sentences, and no government will choose them for me”.
This is Matt Taibbi’s opening statement – worth watching in full, very rousing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEeaVOzqwAY
What was even more fascinating was a Democrat “questioning” Taibbi by spending his entire tine making a polemic about anti-semitic posts increasing since Elon Musk took over Twitter, without asking a single significant question.
His unstated conclusion would seem to be that because some people express racist ideas on a public platform every intelligence agency in the country needs to have a hotline to censor everything that they deem goes against government policy.
Apart from anything else, I find myself wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occurred because bigots among the public expressed their prejudice, or rather because authorities fostered hatred through Jim Crow laws and Goebbels propaganda.
The Democrats have fallen a long way
“Wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occured” ? You absolute disgusting twerp. Did you read nothing? See nothing? Listen to nothing? Manage to not hear every testimony?
Do you wonder about the Gulags, the Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? The Killing Fields?
Piss off and spew your vomit somewhere else.
It does help to read before you shout.
As Einstein said “There is a difference between intelligence and stupidity, intelligence is limited”
I have often found that the stupidest shout loudest.
I watched the videos of both their testimonies. It does make me wonder about extent of censorship going on in the EU and the UK.
The UK has long had a problem linked to its EU membership. Our system historically has few laws, rigorously enforced, whereas most EU countries have so many regulations, it’s impossible to police them all, so they don’t.
Consequently, the UK has been flooded with EU regulations and is trying to enforce them all rigorously, the way we always have. That’s led us to police state territory and people getting reported on spurious grounds.
I’m often attacked for saying we need to shrink the state, but we do: its tentacles are reaching into every aspect of our lives entirely unnecessarily.
Recently a street preacher was arrested, charged and prosecuted for mis-gendering someone, WTAF!
Ironically, the biggest threat to the first amendment in the US comes from the EU and their own censorship agenda.
Some of us have known for sometime that there is “Science” and then there is “Official Science”. You can certainly fool a lot of the people some of the time but maybe not all of them all of the time. But it seems that enough of the people are being fooled and that is all the is important to the propaganda machine which makes Goebbels look like a total novice.
In Canada the Liberal Trudeau govt is trying to bring the internet under govt control so that the govt, with the social media giants, will control what people can read and what they can upload.
For example, do a Google search and, if passed, these bills will allow the govt to control what you see first..