By late spring in 2020 it was already clear that the public policy measures put in place to disrupt the spread of COVID were failures and damaging to children, nursing home residents, and the economic health of America’s families.

Small businesses were getting killed, depression and other mental illnesses were exploding in frequency, preventive health care and even cancer treatments were delayed, and none of this had any substantial effect on infection rates or death.

Few people had objected to “14 days to slow the spread” and the attempt to “bend the curve,” but it was clear that the goal had shifted to an impossible zero COVID policy that would never work. The costs were enormous, the benefits very slight or non-existent. A highly contagious airborne virus is almost impossible to stop; slowing the spread was achievable in the short term, but we had entered the long-term and nothing was working.

So Republican governors started reversing course, and President Trump, who had been too influenced by the public health officials at the beginning of the pandemic–for obvious reasons–had grown skeptical.

One of the original leaders of the movement to reopen the economy was the “fake governor” of Georgia Brian Kemp, who stole the Real™ Governor of Georgia Stacey Abram’s seat through dastardly anti-democratic means.

In April of 2020 he was done with the most restrictive COVID measures, as were most of his constituents, and began lifting the lockdown measures.

The Left and the Mainstream Media went predictably nuts. Totally, completely, and nothing but batsh*t crazy. While today the MSM’s bête noire is Ron DeSantis, in April 2020 is was Kemp. They already hated him for beating Stacey Abrams fair and square in the 2018 election, and they were determined to rip the bark off him for killing grandma. It was a perfect opportunity to express outrage, moral superiority, and to prove that Republicans are cold, calculating, evil child and grandma haters.

I had already been actively fighting the COVID madness by helping found a group–ReOpen Minnesota–that was fighting the fight here in Minnesota. So I was under no illusions that one could have a rational conversation about the costs and benefits of COVID reduction measures. My belief–one that obviously turned out to be correct–is that a highly infectious airborne virus would eventually infect nearly everybody. Hence the drive to completely prevent the spread of COVID was nuts. Instead public health officials should develop a laser focus on protecting the most vulnerable while accepting that there was nothing they could do to successfully prevent the spread throughout society.

Now that nearly everybody has been exposed to or gotten COVID I was proven correct. Even the most fanatic COVIDidiots have been getting infected, sometimes multiple times. When the president, the head of the CDC, and just about every Leftist politician has gotten the virus despite fanatical devotion to the CDC guidelines it is clear that their strategies have been failures. Grandma died anyway, but in the process of worshipping the mask, the six feet separation, the closing of schools and businesses, and ignoring basic health care for non-COVID patients enormous damage was done.

If I never see another worthless plexiglass barrier between me and a cashier it would be too soon. Idiotic.

Few people actually benefited from the COVID policies–the price for most of us has been enormous–but politicians have vastly expanded their powers, social media companies have successfully expanded their control over speech, and online retailers have driven countless local businesses into financial distress or bankruptcy. Delivery services flourished while local businesses saw their profits crater.

COVID policies helped the billionaires and the power mad, and hurt the rest of us. As, I suspect, was intended from the beginning.

Everything the Left did was nuts, but for me one argument from stands out particularly because it was so awful, so politically motivated, so manipulative, and so filled with lies that it still irks me no end. It comes, of course, from The Atlantic, the most frustrating magazine in America. It was an articulation of the argument that the Left still uses to this day: skepticism about the Establishment’s™ COVID policies amounts to killing people. Or, in the words of The Atlantic, human sacrifice.

Georgia’s brash reopening puts much of the state’s working class in an impossible bind: risk death at work, or risk ruining yourself financially at home. In the grips of a pandemic, the approach is a morbid experiment in just how far states can push their people. Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.

In lightning time America went from two weeks to slow the spread to “obey every idiotic thing we demand or you are a serial killer.” The “slow the spread” argument seemed so reasonable that we all went along, unsure of whether it would work but willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the “experts.” But it was a feint, intended to give us false confidence in their plans. They never intended to leave it there, no matter what they told us on Day 1.

The CDC had roped President Trump into taking “bold, decisive” action–just the sort of appeal that worked with Trump–but once they got him to buy into their plans the game was up. They controlled the Narrative™ because he had initially accepted their claim to authority. He appeared at his press conferences, lent his credibility as president to their idiocy, and even showed himself bowing to their authority at times. It was a slow acting poison coursing through his presidency’s veins.

He tried to seize the authority back, but never fully succeeded. He was portrayed as the Bad Orange Man killer willing to buck the advice of the experts he had endorsed. He was caught in a tug of war for power at the worst possible time both for the country and for his campaign.

It was his worst mistake as president, and he never quite recovered. The Deep State finally found a way to make him bleed.

I am convinced that if Trump had stuck to the original 15 days he would have been reelected, despite being blamed for every death that followed. He was blamed anyway–during the campaign he was tarred with his failure to defeat an act of God.

Even so, he would have won. Most of the people who bought the spin hated Trump anyway. By allowing the Left to seize the initiative he managed to lose some Independents who would have voter for him as well. As Trump would say, “sad.”

People in states that rejected the public health advocates’ advice did just as well as those who were bullied by the health nazis. And their kids did better, as did people who never succumbed to COVID.

Life was better in Red states, so Trump would have sided with the winners from the beginning. Instead he seemed to have lost a battle with his enemies for the first time, and it cost him.

The Atlantic, of course, succeeded in spreading their poison, but their predictions failed to pan out.

All Georgians can do now is try to protect themselves as best they can. If social distancing decreases because lots of businesses reopen, another deluge of COVID-19 cases could be inevitable. Because of how infections tend to progress, it may be two or three weeks before hospitals see a new wave of people whose lungs look like they’re studded with ground glass in X-rays. By then, there’s no telling how many more people could be carrying the disease into nail salons or tattoo parlors, going about their daily lives because they were told they could do so safely.

The disaster never happened. It was always pure propaganda. While the COVID psychosis was and remains real with some extremists, many of the people pushing this Narrative knew what they were doing and it was purely political.

Yet the disaster predicted by opponents of the extreme measures have proven, unfortunately, to have come true. Learning loss among children, economic disaster for many Americans, loss of freedom, spreading censorship, delayed preventive care and treatment. All have come to pass–and we will pay the price for decades having not saved an appreciable number of lives.

We skeptics were right. The Establishment™ was wrong. Yet they won the war in every way that matters. They accumulated money and power, we pay the price of learning loss, economic crisis, a still broken health care system, and a lingering mental health crisis.

An America that followed the rational path of COVID amelioration, not COVID elimination would be wealthier, healthier, better educated, and more prosperous. An America more like Florida, not California.

If ever there is an actual competition between DeSantis and Trump, I suspect that COVID policies will come up and play a decisive role in the battle. Trump, for all his successes, initially and fatally chose the wrong side in the battle. He even criticized Kemp for his policies publicly while apparently agreeing in private. He should have stuck to  his guns.

Trump had so many victories on so many fronts, and reshaped the Republican Party for the better. But even his greatest supporters should acknowledge that on this one issue he succumbed to the entreaties of the Deep State, and in doing so lost control over the narrative and over policy without ever being able to regain enough ground to force a change of direction in policy.

Whenever you hear about an Establishment politician pushing a policy, don’t believe their explanation for why they are doing it. Ask, instead, who benefits. Where will the money and power flow? Chances are it will not be you.

UPDATED to correct bonehead error.